News

ExtraHop Appliance Aims for Simplified Big Data Analytics

• By David Ramel
• November 3, 2015

ExtraHop Networks Inc. today announced the fifth generation of its analytics platform, another "Big Data-for-everyone" product featuring a new Explore Appliance that lets organizations wed historical metrics with real-time streaming data to get a multi-dimensional view of wire data.

The Seattle company defines wire data as data-in-motion, emanating from all network, client, application, infrastructure and business sources.

"ExtraHop 5.0 delivers turnkey stream analytics for wire data, enabling organizations to automatically discover devices, systems, and their relationships; observe and measure their behavior; and explore this data to unlock powerful, cross-domain insights that extend across the business," the company said in a statement today.

The company said its solution is designed to provide simplified Big Data analytics for everyone, one of many vendor initiatives seeking to provide an easier onramp into the esoteric realm of advanced analytics. Having access to an enormous amount of information flowing across the network is a valuable new capability, but turning that data into business insights is difficult, the company said. Organizations previously had to choose between shallow tools that provide only narrow views of data or incomplete information -- or cumbersome, expensive products that require manual processes.

The ExtraHop platform lets enterprises see, save, search and explore all historical or current data coming from many sources in one centralized UI that provides visualization and analysis functionality, working on existing tools or standalone. "A Big Data approach to IT once required complex systems getting incomplete information from disparate sources, and data scientists to make sense of it all," the company said. "But now Big Data is for everyone."

The new ExtraHop Explore Appliance lets users query, investigate and correlate historical metrics -- including custom-defined metrics -- so it can be used with another appliance that targets real-time wire data, the company said. "When coupled with the real-time, full-stream analytics of the ExtraHop Discover Appliance, users have a comprehensive, dynamic, and multi-dimensional view into the most voluminous and accurate source of IT and business data," ExtraHop said.

The new platform also provides agentless, incremental monitoring of networked devices in ever-changing environments to help organizations quicken their Internet of Things (IoT) projects, the company said.

It also provides new security and performance capabilities. "Network and IT security teams can now rapidly correlate all north/south, and east/west traffic, whether in the datacenter or the cloud," ExtraHop said. "This visibility enables teams to drill down to easily identify anomalous and disruptive behavior from any device or user, speeding insight into how that behavior is impacting the performance, availability, and security of the infrastructure, dramatically improving mean time to resolution and ensuring persistent visibility."

The platform also provides automatic, dynamic discovery of any IoT or other device, improved orchestration and automation of resources through a REST API, and a new UI and UX.

Using the REST API, the company said, means that, "For the first time in the industry, users can programmatically use, control and administrate any physical or virtual appliance through any programming language."

ExtraHop said the Explore Appliance, which can index and store more than 1 billion messages per day, has a per-node pricing scheme starting at $10,000 per node. The company provides an interactive online demo to investigate the platform further.